Sebastian Stan loses himself in A Different Man

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I’ve been waiting for the movies to catch up to our current obsession with “improving” our faces through procedures and surgeries. Facelifts, fillers, Botox, Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, even Instagram filters – they’re not just changing how individual faces look. They’re changing how we, collectively, think a face should look. And when enough of us have done “a little something,” we will have changed what a human face is.

Now these movies are arriving – as body horror. In The Substance (in theatres now), Demi Moore’s back agonizingly rips open as she births a younger, more nubile version of herself (Margaret Qualley) after ingesting a mysterious potion. In Shell (release date TBD), Elisabeth Moss endures gnarly side effects after undergoing an aggressive, crustacean-based anti-aging procedure.

And in A Different Man, which opened Sept. 27, Sebastian Stan – playing Edward, an actor who has neurofibromatosis, a condition in which tumours grow along nerves in the head and other parts of the body – painfully peels off chunks of his face after enduring an experimental operation. Collectively, these films ask us to confront our identity: What is our substance? Is it inextricable from our shell? And can anyone actually become a different person?

Edward, who has internalized the idea that people are repelled by his appearance – and therefore, by him – lives a lonely life in a crappy apartment in a dingy slice of New York, hopelessly in love with his neighbour, the playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve, Presumed Innocent). After the procedure cures his condition, he declares Edward dead and starts over as Guy. Money and women flow his way, including Ingrid, who casts him as Edward in a play she wrote. But Guy can’t shake his habitual malaise, and when Oswald (Adam Pearson) shows up – another actor with neurofibromatosis, but one who is confident, convivial, charming – Guy is forced to ask himself whether the world hated him, or he just hated himself.

Stan, 42, loves a good actorly transformation – he’s disappeared into faces as disparate as Jeff Gillooly (I, Tonya), Tommy Lee (Pam & Tommy) and Donald Trump’s (The Apprentice – which includes a scene of Trump enduring grisly liposuction and a scalp tuck). But as Stan said in a joint video interview this week with Aaron Schimberg, A Different Man’s writer/director, his most startling metamorphosis was growing from the 13-year-old kid who discovered that he loved acting – “the ability, without judgment, to take these big leaps and play whoever, older people, knights, wizards, clowns” – into a movie star whom people want to pigeonhole or worse, own.

That transformation is a mindblower, he says: “Coming up, there were always 20 of us going out for the same roles. The Captain Kirks, superheroes, actiony SWAT team guys, or the high school quarterback idiots. These are roles we stereotype people with. The people who sent me those scripts were thinking that I am very different than how I think of myself.” (Though he did become one of those Marvel heroes: Bucky Barnes/Winter Soldier.)

“Fortunately, I found different things I wanted to do and people who wanted to give me a shot,” Stan continues. “My doing projects where I lose myself, where I’m able to grow beyond the self, helps me preserve something very personal that the kid in me loved about acting: You learn about yourself and others by confronting the things within you that are not comfortable, that perhaps scare you or you haven’t figured out. A degree of Trump lives in me, and a degree of Edward as well.

“But the more success you get, the trickier it becomes. Who do you trust? Are people telling you the truth or what they think you want to hear? Do they want something from you?” Stan’s awareness of being regarded as public property, of feeling powerless in terms of what people project onto him – that got him closest to the everyday experience of people, like Edward, who live with facial differences.

Acting with Pearson – who’d previously worked with Schimberg on Chained for Life (2019), and opposite Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin (2013) – was invaluable, Stan says: “Whenever I was nervous or insecure, it was feeding into Edward, so I welcomed it. And Adam is in great ownership of himself, in a way that’s refreshing, that I don’t see in many other people. He was nothing but open, so that made me feel safe around him, and comfortable about going to some hard places.”

Film has always been fascinated by physical transformation, from Pygmalion to Pretty Woman, Eyes Without a Face to Face/Off, and Beauty and the Beast to The Joker. The default position is that a makeover will change our lives for the better. A Different Man takes a darker view.

“I have a cleft palate, and I’ve always blamed my self-consciousness on the way that I look,” Schimberg says. “Then I ran into a woman I’d known years ago, who was shy, but who had taken classes to become more assertive. I didn’t like the new her – I found her off-putting. It threw me into an identity crisis. Which is the real her? Could I do this? Then who would I be? It’s great that people think the film is timely, but its subject – what we’re willing to do to find acceptance – was relevant 100 years ago if not 1,000 years ago.”

“There’s a moment where Edward gets the part in the play, he gets to have sex with the girl – but it’s short-lived,” Stan says. “Unless we accept ourselves, there’s a plateau to the pleasure. You think, ‘If I just had the money for …’ or ‘Once I meet a person who understands me …’ But that place doesn’t exist, it’s all a mirage. You get the thing, and then there’s something about it that doesn’t feel real or authentic. You feel you don’t deserve it, it’s gonna be taken away from you, or you immediately need more.”

There’s an unnerving sex scene in the middle of the film, where Ingrid asks Guy to put on a mask that doctors made of Edward’s “Before” face, and “for one moment, he feels accepted for his whole self,” Stan says. “Then the moment breaks, and why? Because the old familiar finger is tapping the mind, the inner narrator who’s absorbed the dictates of society is going, ‘Wait, this is too different, we know how sex is supposed to look, how we should look performing sex,’ and it kills the genuine impulse that was connecting these two people.

“If only we could really allow other people to see our authentic self,” he sums up. “But we don’t. Unfortunately, most people’s authentic selves only meet for a few seconds.” Especially when we’re so preoccupied by what we see and don’t see in our own mirrors.

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